19 ms·

111-1111111 is a valid Windows 95 key (2021) [video]

232 points by hexadec 4y ago

apprenticemason 4y ago
000-0000000 was the key I kept in my memory in case I needed to install Visual Basic 6.0 on a new computer back in my middle school days :) great memory I forgot about, thank you for sharing the link.
- eclipxe 4y ago
  FCKGW
  - tim-- 4y ago
    I probably am overthinking this; I always wondered if that key was purposely leaked by someone who didn't like Bill Gates.
prettyStandard 4y ago
TLDW: First three digits are ignored, The remaining are mod 7. Reminds me of this classic. https://xkcd.com/424/ https://xkcd.com/424/
vxxzy 4y ago
Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purpose. Whoever you are, if you see this, thank you!
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  There’s also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like “1234567890123”
  - pxx 4y ago
    Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.
    - hadlock 4y ago
      All 'G' was valid for Quake 3. I was surprised to find this out from my friend's 11 year old little sibling.
      - flatiron 4y ago
        I used a key gen for quake 3 when it came out. Was surprised when I was able to play online. Told my friends who were not able to play online. I guess I was just lucky my key was an actual key!
    - ilyt 4y ago
      That feels like some dev being lazy and adding backdoor easy to type keys for testing stuff
- gandalfian 4y ago
  I once used the example key shown in a software manuals how to register section. It worked. I was rather chuffed at the time.
- noAnswer 4y ago
  My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)
  - boredemployee 4y ago
    wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it worked? what a wizard!
    - esrauch 4y ago
      The way this worked was there's a very large amount of keys accepted by the installer and a very tiny fraction of them are actually issued / valid for online play. There wasn't that much value in having the installer keys be that narrow; if you have a legal cd it'll have the key printed right on the case (and there's no way to stop sharing). If it's a burned cd either the person who ripped it can just include the key or they can edit the installer itself to accept any key.
- qu4z-2 4y ago
  My standard strategy for installing StarCraft (at LAN parties I often had to do it a few times in a row) was just to mash the keyboard a few times until I got through. It usually took somewhere between five and ten tries, in my experience.
- Razengan 4y ago
  StarCraft was my first attempt and success at "cracking" a game! Apparently it had a bug where it didn't recognize the CD on Windows 98 but it worked on Windows 95! Didn't have internet, so I fired up Visual Studio, stepped through the .exe, and tried flipping each JE/JNE or JZ/JNZ instruction that came before the copy protection error showed up. It worked!! I searched for the sequence of instructions in a hex editor and modified the exe. And it led me to one of the best games ever to this date. :)
vocram 4y ago
I wish more YouTube videos were like this: no intro, outro, ads, annoying music, please like and sub, captivating voice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- danrl 4y ago
  there are tons of these videos on all kinds of topics. Unfortunately, without a captivating thumbnail view counts are extremely low and click through rate is laughable. Yet some creators refuse to A/B test crafted thumbnails that have often nothing to do with the video but drive views. Similarly, I keep my videos short and concise as I see viewer time as at least as valuable as mine and so do plenty of other creators. Unfortunately, viewers don’t appreciate this en mass. My sad conclusion is that people don’t value their time high enough to immediately leave a video that is wasting their time or, as so often, has almost nothing to do with the title or thumbnail. People forget why they clicked on a video within seconds of watching it. Source: I am a creator myself, releasing a mew video every Friday. I have read the engagement guides from YouTube and other creators and decided to not take part in this landgrab for viewer time. People have more important things in their life than my videos and I should be mindful of how I use their time.
  - nayuki 4y ago
    A mew video, you say? stacksmashing has one ;-) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fWTDUdWGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fWTDUdWGA "Exploring the Mew Glitch"
- ecliptik 4y ago
  Ask me 5 years ago if I'd regularly watch someone play Doom on youtube and I would have laughed. Then I discovered Decino and their Doom deep dive and playthrough channel [1]. Similar thing, no intro or self-promotion, not even a Patron. Just someone playing Doom levels with a calm and even tone explaining things about the game I never would have guessed and it's strangely relaxing. 1. https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8V9aiz50m6NVn0ix5v8RQ#bottom-sheet https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8V9aiz50m6NVn0ix5v8RQ#botto...
twawaaay 4y ago
It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost. There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key. Windows security mechanism was no better and there were copies distributed so much that probably many people remember "standard" CD Keys even to this day. And it was pretty much safe because most software did not have ability to phone home so the software developer would have no way of knowing that somebody used an illegal copy. The business model was mostly companies paying for software (fearing an ex-employee reported illegal use). I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video. The only exception was sometimes people bought OEM software with their hardware.
- ta1243 4y ago
  Everyone took software from the office and installed it at home, that's why everyone uses microsoft at home, you got it for free from work. Worked for microsoft, worked for the people taking it home. Everyone was happy.
- forinti 4y ago
  One mechanism which was sometimes used for more expensive software was a dongle connected to the parallel port.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    This still exists today, only now with USB dongles.
    - PapaSpaceDelta 4y ago
zerr 4y ago
It was valid for Visual Studio 97 as well.
- JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
  Yup, I remember using this key for visual studio 6.0 when I was like ten years old.
skipkey 4y ago
So my last name is Key, and my initials are C D, so in the mid-late 90s any time I was prompted to enter a CD Key I would always try “yes”. It worked at least half a dozen times.
- mdip 4y ago
  Thanks for that, it brought me back to my teens. In the Renegade BBS system, for like one minor version or so, you could authenticate to any account, including SysOp, by hitting Enter instead of providing a password. Of course, in Renegade and many BBSes, you could login with either your account name or ID, which was an auto-incrementing (the manual way) integer starting at "0", the Sysop. And I'm fairly certain that the problem wasn't triggered unless you logged in by ID, which few ever did. On one Saturday nearly every BBS in my area code running that software was restoring from backup. I stumbled upon it because I was "1" on another BBS[0] and accidentally popped "Enter" aiming for Shift when typing my password. After picking my jaw up from the table I called my buddy and told him to unplug the phone line. :) [0] Actually, I had hacked up and substantially re-written from the leaked Telegard 2.5 source (whichever was the origin of Renegade's code) and the password validation code was insanity -- I was young enough to see hacking as mystical and suspected I'd found a cleverly hidden back-door so I rewrote the entire thing to be as "dumb as the rest of the password handling logic was"; I had heard, later, that there was something funny going on but I stopped playing with that code by then and the Internet quickly ended that world. In all likelihood, the original developers were doing something novel that I was totally unfamiliar with and I made it worse, but I like to think I "locked that up". :)
Logans_Run 4y ago
If memory serves (and it was a long time ago) Win98, Office 97 and NT4 all had an easy to guess key. As long as the ABC (product type eg. Pro, Home) followed by the -xxx (first two digits added up to 9 as the last digit eg 639) -xxxx and the last 4 digits also added up to 9 as the last digit) all would be good and passed all the validation checks. A product key of xyz-000-0000 would work although it was a bit obvious where as something like fgh-729-32139 would sail through.... Ah, the good ol' days
pimlottc 4y ago
It took me a while to realize this meant "license key", my first thought was about keyboard codes.
- vidanay 4y ago
  The "111-1111111" key is right next to the "any" key on your keyboard.
  - pimlottc 4y ago
    Obviously it's not a physical key, but the title suggests a surprising result.
mseepgood 4y ago
Why were all triplets blacklisted except 000, 111 and 222? What was the thought process behind it?
- AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  It might be compiler generated code. That the algo is more complex.
snotrockets 4y ago
This video could've been a textual content.
morninglight 4y ago
Software Piracy That is the reason Microsoft went bankrupt, and Bill Gates is living in a mobile home in the Ozarks. You should be ashamed!
aaronmdjones 4y ago
I was reinstalling Win95 and Win98 so much in my youth that, to this day, I still have my Windows 95 OEM number and Windows 98SE CDKEY memorised and can recall them with no effort. 20 and 25 alphanumerics respectively. I didn't know about the much smaller 10-digit Win95 keys.
jeroenhd 4y ago
MS activation mechanisms always remind me of this video: https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y; how Microsoft Bob was used to initialize a chunk of random data used with the cryptographic activation mechanism of Windows XP.
toasteros 4y ago
It's valid for Quake 3, too!
tastysandwich 4y ago
I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days. I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that completely reset the trial period. I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party libraries a developer could use to effortlessly guard against this sort of thing? (If I ever need it again I will buy it. I just literally needed it a couple of times for something personal and will likely never need it again)
- joseda-hg 4y ago
  Meh, it's common to let pirates get away with it because it helps adoption Also good antipiracy software is like Financial/business software, usually surprisingly expensive
- MexicanJoe 4y ago
  I even used that on a piece of software last year to extend the trial period. It was good software, so I brought it afterward. But I was surprised that the old trick still worked.
- ace2358 4y ago
  Ableton live used to give out 90 trials with a new “live” account. I used it for about half a year with various different emails. They stopped this from working on live 11 and I decided that the software wasn’t for me :)
- dieulot 4y ago
  Most Mac-native apps operate pretty much (usually with binary plist, but MacOS includes CLI tools to operate them) like that today, and likely for ever. https://twitter.com/panic/status/679094045768073216 https://twitter.com/panic/status/679094045768073216
- e28eta 4y ago
  I think there’s an interesting parallel with “supercookies” on the web, or the long-running battle on iOS to permanently, uniquely identify phones. Should the user be able to control their machine, and delete data that the app has written? Should they be able to ‘look like a new user’? Or should companies/apps have the ability to keep persistent data on the user’s machine, and/or link them to a previously collected set of data about that user?
jasoneckert 4y ago
I remember using this key to install hundreds (possibly thousands?) of school PCs back in the 1990s since I couldn't remember our volume license key. And Microsoft's terms explicitly stated the key we used didn't matter as long as an audit revealed that the number of installed systems matched the number of purchased licenses. Similarly, 111-1111112 was a valid key for Office.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  That practice never stopped: even today, the current version of Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise available for download from MSDN (well, "Visual Studio Subscription") has an option to use a static product-key (which I believe is the same for everyone, considering the search-results I get for the first 5 digits...) - but for some reason the lower SKUs (Community, Standard (rip), and Professional) switched to _only_ supporting MSA-based online activation, so if you have an air-gapped or disconnected dev situation you have to shell-out for the full-fat edition - but at least you get to use it indefinitely. ...which is always really important considering the 20-30+ year lifecycle of actual software - whereas Adobe and their Creative Cloud service is copying Apple's strategy of pretending all their software older than 5-6 years simply never existed in the first place. "Adobe Flash/Fireworks/FreeHand? Never heard of it." - which is a huge PITA for people who might have old source files in those lovely propreitary binary file-formats that can't be opened in newer versions of Adobe software - so what on earth does Adobe expect them to do? This is insane...
quinrel 4y ago
I remember installing Windows 95 some time in the late 90s only to realize I didn't have a license key handy. Out of frustration I entered all 1s in. I have never been more surprised at something working unexpectedly like that.
technick 4y ago
It's also the valid key for Office 97
jbverschoor 4y ago
Just a side question.. Did the floppy disk version also call it a CD key?
charlieyu1 4y ago
The sum of last 7 digits has to be a multiple of 7, not sure if I remember correctly but definitely very simple
neverrroot 4y ago
The good old FXP days…
ofalkaed 4y ago
This gives me some serious nostalgia for those simple and naive days. Around 95' is when I accomplished my one and only successful attempt at cracking. Some company had their software downloads in password protected StuffIt archives, anyone could download the software but you had to buy it to get the password so you could decompress the archive. I really wanted to use that software and I searched everywhere on the net and on BBSs for that program or the password with no luck, so I set out to crack the archive. I made two archives, one with password protection and one without and then opened them in ResEdit, turns out the only difference between them was that the protected file had a second resource other than the data, delete that extra resource and it became a normal unprotected StuffIt archive. I shared my findings to the community and within days it was all over the web and on every BBS, people where pretending they were the ones who made the hack, it was everywhere. Within weeks StufIt released a free update to fix this and I felt quite powerful at the effect I had caused. Years later I realized that my crack was banal and probably common knowledge to anyone but an ignorant teenager, most were just smart enough to not share it and ruin a good thing. So I inadvertently made the digital world a safer place. Edit: thinking on it more, I doubt I was even the first person to share this information, I was just the first person stupid enough to share it on an easy to find warez/cracking site that everyone had access too. I also seem to recall that Stuffit explicitly said that this password protection was not a safe or reliable way to protect your data, if you wanted that you had to upgrade to the paid version. I probably had no real effect on anything and the new password protection StuffIt rolled out was probably already in the works when I showed up.
phoenixreader 4y ago
It's interesting that Youtube is also recommending this to me today. I wonder what caused this coincidence. Anyone else seeing this on their Youtube feed?
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  I suppose YouTube saw the spike in the video's popularity, caused by this HN post, and started recommending it to people who might be interested in it.
  - stiGGG 4y ago
    I had it in my feed and watched it some hours before this was posted here.
  - aprilnya 4y ago
    Or the other way around — YouTube started recommending it more, so OP saw it and posted it on HN.
macjohnmcc 4y ago
I worked at Microsoft when Windows 95 was released and I'm certain that is the key we use to install it internally.
innocentoldguy 4y ago
111-1111111 is also a valid key for Windows 98 and the Office suite of that era.
AnnoyedComment 4y ago
[dead]
bobowzki 4y ago
Identity key...
rootsudo 4y ago
Reading all these comments about people mailing floppies and cd's, it's glad I was also part of that scene too - in trading fansubbed anime titles, and trading for more copies to complete strangers. Had a geocities page, and even did transcoding with tmpgenc - back when k-lite codec packs were popular, pre VLC days. Just can't believe with the right keywords, you can still see these old posts on the internet - 2002/2003 was truly different and I bet pre-2000 even wild.
MrYellowP 4y ago
You've posted this 12 hours ago, which was roughly when it showed up in my youtube feed. Did you post this, because it showed up in your youtube feed?
- nezza-_- 4y ago
  It seems like the YouTube algorithm started randomly recommending it to a lot of people (before it landed on HN)
meerita 4y ago
Ah, the gold old days of software-keys.txt lists with millions of keys of all version of DOS, Windows, OS/Warp, Autodesk, etc.
chungy 4y ago
OEM keys for Windows 95 followed a similar structure to the retail key, albeit with a lot more digits. OEM Windows 95 keys came in the form of XXXXX-OEM-00YYYYY-ZZZZZ. The XXXXX grouping represents when Microsoft issued the key by day-of-year and year, and the operating system would validate any number where the first three numbers range from 001 to 365 (or 366 for year 96), and the last two X digits were 95-99. The YYYYY group must be a multiple to 7, excluding the number 0. The ZZZZZ group is basically noise and anything is permissible in them. Now you can run a Windows 95 keygen in your head. You're welcome :) Actually I believe Windows 98, Me, and 2000 have a similar scheme but they obfuscate it with some algorithm to generate the 25-char alphanumeric style that Microsoft continues to use to this day. I've never dug into how it goes, but you can see the 95-style key on System Properties post-install.
- bonney_io 4y ago
  For no reason other than it seemed fun, I used this new knowledge to implement my own version of said key-gen, in my choice of dev environment: Swift and Xcode playgrounds. Fun little exercise. https://gist.github.com/Bonney/5cc85f41cdeb80146c7d5169ded8aecd https://gist.github.com/Bonney/5cc85f41cdeb80146c7d5169ded8a...
  - chungy 4y ago
    Impressive, I see one definite problem and a potential one: * I had incorrectly stated the conditions of the Y grouping. The digits must sum up to a multiple of 7, rather than be a multiple of 7 by themselves. 0000007 and 0000016 are valid sequences, for instance, but 0000014 is not. * The Z grouping probably has to be [0-9]. At least I've never tested non-numeric characters whenever I've installed Windows 95 (I usually type out 00195-OEM-0000007-00000 when I install it).
fitjghfgddgf 4y ago
[flagged]
Villodre 4y ago
I found a Half-Life CD in the street, just laying there, when it was a new game and all the rage. I guess it slipped from somebody's jewel case or the like. By some miracle, it wasn't scratched enough to be unreadable, so I went and installed it but… no key. Out of frustration I started to just type silly sequences, until arriving at one that worked: 1234567890 until filling the textbox completely. Man, the sheer joy and happiness when the game installed and ran without issue. I had to tweak the settings a lot because I had a P75 with a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card but nonetheless I enjoyed a lot of that game and I still have that disc. I hope the original owner was able to get hold of a copy and still use his original licence though.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
To reinstall Win95 in late 90´s was a chance. You had an hour or two then the worms ended it. Fun times. :)

232 points by hexadec 4y ago

000-0000000 was the key I kept in my memory in case I needed to install Visual Basic 6.0 on a new computer back in my middle school days :) great memory I forgot about, thank you for sharing the link.

eclipxe 4y ago
FCKGW
- tim-- 4y ago
  I probably am overthinking this; I always wondered if that key was purposely leaked by someone who didn't like Bill Gates.

prettyStandard 4y ago

TLDW: First three digits are ignored, The remaining are mod 7. Reminds me of this classic. https://xkcd.com/424/ https://xkcd.com/424/

vxxzy 4y ago

Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purpose. Whoever you are, if you see this, thank you!

Waterluvian 4y ago
There’s also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like “1234567890123”
- pxx 4y ago
  Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.
  - hadlock 4y ago
    All 'G' was valid for Quake 3. I was surprised to find this out from my friend's 11 year old little sibling.
    - flatiron 4y ago
      I used a key gen for quake 3 when it came out. Was surprised when I was able to play online. Told my friends who were not able to play online. I guess I was just lucky my key was an actual key!
  - ilyt 4y ago
    That feels like some dev being lazy and adding backdoor easy to type keys for testing stuff
gandalfian 4y ago
I once used the example key shown in a software manuals how to register section. It worked. I was rather chuffed at the time.
noAnswer 4y ago
My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)
- boredemployee 4y ago
  wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it worked? what a wizard!
  - esrauch 4y ago
    The way this worked was there's a very large amount of keys accepted by the installer and a very tiny fraction of them are actually issued / valid for online play. There wasn't that much value in having the installer keys be that narrow; if you have a legal cd it'll have the key printed right on the case (and there's no way to stop sharing). If it's a burned cd either the person who ripped it can just include the key or they can edit the installer itself to accept any key.
qu4z-2 4y ago
My standard strategy for installing StarCraft (at LAN parties I often had to do it a few times in a row) was just to mash the keyboard a few times until I got through. It usually took somewhere between five and ten tries, in my experience.
Razengan 4y ago
StarCraft was my first attempt and success at "cracking" a game! Apparently it had a bug where it didn't recognize the CD on Windows 98 but it worked on Windows 95! Didn't have internet, so I fired up Visual Studio, stepped through the .exe, and tried flipping each JE/JNE or JZ/JNZ instruction that came before the copy protection error showed up. It worked!! I searched for the sequence of instructions in a hex editor and modified the exe. And it led me to one of the best games ever to this date. :)

vocram 4y ago

I wish more YouTube videos were like this: no intro, outro, ads, annoying music, please like and sub, captivating voice.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danrl 4y ago
there are tons of these videos on all kinds of topics. Unfortunately, without a captivating thumbnail view counts are extremely low and click through rate is laughable. Yet some creators refuse to A/B test crafted thumbnails that have often nothing to do with the video but drive views. Similarly, I keep my videos short and concise as I see viewer time as at least as valuable as mine and so do plenty of other creators. Unfortunately, viewers don’t appreciate this en mass. My sad conclusion is that people don’t value their time high enough to immediately leave a video that is wasting their time or, as so often, has almost nothing to do with the title or thumbnail. People forget why they clicked on a video within seconds of watching it. Source: I am a creator myself, releasing a mew video every Friday. I have read the engagement guides from YouTube and other creators and decided to not take part in this landgrab for viewer time. People have more important things in their life than my videos and I should be mindful of how I use their time.
- nayuki 4y ago
  A mew video, you say? stacksmashing has one ;-) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fWTDUdWGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8fWTDUdWGA "Exploring the Mew Glitch"
ecliptik 4y ago
Ask me 5 years ago if I'd regularly watch someone play Doom on youtube and I would have laughed. Then I discovered Decino and their Doom deep dive and playthrough channel [1]. Similar thing, no intro or self-promotion, not even a Patron. Just someone playing Doom levels with a calm and even tone explaining things about the game I never would have guessed and it's strangely relaxing. 1. https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8V9aiz50m6NVn0ix5v8RQ#bottom-sheet https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCJ8V9aiz50m6NVn0ix5v8RQ#botto...

twawaaay 4y ago

It may sound strange to people who were born later. But in 90s these mechanisms were in infancy. It was normal for computers to auto-login and have no password at all, processes could each read entire memory on the machine. Software was cracked the moment it came out and it was assumed people bought any software because they feared legal action rather than because they had no other way to get their hands on it -- late 90s and early 2000s you could download pretty much anything you wanted, immediately, for no cost. There really wasn't much possibility to protect your piece of software. If it was put on a CD somebody will either extract the key or modify your software to accept any key. Windows security mechanism was no better and there were copies distributed so much that probably many people remember "standard" CD Keys even to this day. And it was pretty much safe because most software did not have ability to phone home so the software developer would have no way of knowing that somebody used an illegal copy. The business model was mostly companies paying for software (fearing an ex-employee reported illegal use). I remember most teens and young adults (which is most people who used computers) would never buy any kind of software, music or video. The only exception was sometimes people bought OEM software with their hardware.

ta1243 4y ago
Everyone took software from the office and installed it at home, that's why everyone uses microsoft at home, you got it for free from work. Worked for microsoft, worked for the people taking it home. Everyone was happy.
forinti 4y ago
One mechanism which was sometimes used for more expensive software was a dongle connected to the parallel port.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  This still exists today, only now with USB dongles.
  - PapaSpaceDelta 4y ago

zerr 4y ago

It was valid for Visual Studio 97 as well.

JoshGlazebrook 4y ago
Yup, I remember using this key for visual studio 6.0 when I was like ten years old.

skipkey 4y ago

So my last name is Key, and my initials are C D, so in the mid-late 90s any time I was prompted to enter a CD Key I would always try “yes”. It worked at least half a dozen times.

mdip 4y ago
Thanks for that, it brought me back to my teens. In the Renegade BBS system, for like one minor version or so, you could authenticate to any account, including SysOp, by hitting Enter instead of providing a password. Of course, in Renegade and many BBSes, you could login with either your account name or ID, which was an auto-incrementing (the manual way) integer starting at "0", the Sysop. And I'm fairly certain that the problem wasn't triggered unless you logged in by ID, which few ever did. On one Saturday nearly every BBS in my area code running that software was restoring from backup. I stumbled upon it because I was "1" on another BBS[0] and accidentally popped "Enter" aiming for Shift when typing my password. After picking my jaw up from the table I called my buddy and told him to unplug the phone line. :) [0] Actually, I had hacked up and substantially re-written from the leaked Telegard 2.5 source (whichever was the origin of Renegade's code) and the password validation code was insanity -- I was young enough to see hacking as mystical and suspected I'd found a cleverly hidden back-door so I rewrote the entire thing to be as "dumb as the rest of the password handling logic was"; I had heard, later, that there was something funny going on but I stopped playing with that code by then and the Internet quickly ended that world. In all likelihood, the original developers were doing something novel that I was totally unfamiliar with and I made it worse, but I like to think I "locked that up". :)

Logans_Run 4y ago

If memory serves (and it was a long time ago) Win98, Office 97 and NT4 all had an easy to guess key. As long as the ABC (product type eg. Pro, Home) followed by the -xxx (first two digits added up to 9 as the last digit eg 639) -xxxx and the last 4 digits also added up to 9 as the last digit) all would be good and passed all the validation checks. A product key of xyz-000-0000 would work although it was a bit obvious where as something like fgh-729-32139 would sail through.... Ah, the good ol' days

pimlottc 4y ago

It took me a while to realize this meant "license key", my first thought was about keyboard codes.

vidanay 4y ago
The "111-1111111" key is right next to the "any" key on your keyboard.
- pimlottc 4y ago
  Obviously it's not a physical key, but the title suggests a surprising result.

mseepgood 4y ago

Why were all triplets blacklisted except 000, 111 and 222? What was the thought process behind it?

AtNightWeCode 4y ago
It might be compiler generated code. That the algo is more complex.

snotrockets 4y ago

This video could've been a textual content.

morninglight 4y ago

Software Piracy That is the reason Microsoft went bankrupt, and Bill Gates is living in a mobile home in the Ozarks. You should be ashamed!

aaronmdjones 4y ago

I was reinstalling Win95 and Win98 so much in my youth that, to this day, I still have my Windows 95 OEM number and Windows 98SE CDKEY memorised and can recall them with no effort. 20 and 25 alphanumerics respectively. I didn't know about the much smaller 10-digit Win95 keys.

jeroenhd 4y ago

MS activation mechanisms always remind me of this video: https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y; how Microsoft Bob was used to initialize a chunk of random data used with the cryptographic activation mechanism of Windows XP.

toasteros 4y ago

It's valid for Quake 3, too!

tastysandwich 4y ago

I recently wanted to use a program for a short amount of time for personal use, but the trial period was only 7 days. I used strace to find that it kept the timestamp of its first run in a text file, and would read that on startup. Deleting that completely reset the trial period. I was pretty amazed - I know most people aren't computer savvy to bypass trial periods, but I figured there'd be third-party libraries a developer could use to effortlessly guard against this sort of thing? (If I ever need it again I will buy it. I just literally needed it a couple of times for something personal and will likely never need it again)

joseda-hg 4y ago
Meh, it's common to let pirates get away with it because it helps adoption Also good antipiracy software is like Financial/business software, usually surprisingly expensive
MexicanJoe 4y ago
I even used that on a piece of software last year to extend the trial period. It was good software, so I brought it afterward. But I was surprised that the old trick still worked.
ace2358 4y ago
Ableton live used to give out 90 trials with a new “live” account. I used it for about half a year with various different emails. They stopped this from working on live 11 and I decided that the software wasn’t for me :)
dieulot 4y ago
Most Mac-native apps operate pretty much (usually with binary plist, but MacOS includes CLI tools to operate them) like that today, and likely for ever. https://twitter.com/panic/status/679094045768073216 https://twitter.com/panic/status/679094045768073216
e28eta 4y ago
I think there’s an interesting parallel with “supercookies” on the web, or the long-running battle on iOS to permanently, uniquely identify phones. Should the user be able to control their machine, and delete data that the app has written? Should they be able to ‘look like a new user’? Or should companies/apps have the ability to keep persistent data on the user’s machine, and/or link them to a previously collected set of data about that user?

jasoneckert 4y ago

I remember using this key to install hundreds (possibly thousands?) of school PCs back in the 1990s since I couldn't remember our volume license key. And Microsoft's terms explicitly stated the key we used didn't matter as long as an audit revealed that the number of installed systems matched the number of purchased licenses. Similarly, 111-1111112 was a valid key for Office.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
That practice never stopped: even today, the current version of Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise available for download from MSDN (well, "Visual Studio Subscription") has an option to use a static product-key (which I believe is the same for everyone, considering the search-results I get for the first 5 digits...) - but for some reason the lower SKUs (Community, Standard (rip), and Professional) switched to _only_ supporting MSA-based online activation, so if you have an air-gapped or disconnected dev situation you have to shell-out for the full-fat edition - but at least you get to use it indefinitely. ...which is always really important considering the 20-30+ year lifecycle of actual software - whereas Adobe and their Creative Cloud service is copying Apple's strategy of pretending all their software older than 5-6 years simply never existed in the first place. "Adobe Flash/Fireworks/FreeHand? Never heard of it." - which is a huge PITA for people who might have old source files in those lovely propreitary binary file-formats that can't be opened in newer versions of Adobe software - so what on earth does Adobe expect them to do? This is insane...

quinrel 4y ago

I remember installing Windows 95 some time in the late 90s only to realize I didn't have a license key handy. Out of frustration I entered all 1s in. I have never been more surprised at something working unexpectedly like that.

technick 4y ago

It's also the valid key for Office 97

jbverschoor 4y ago

Just a side question.. Did the floppy disk version also call it a CD key?

charlieyu1 4y ago

The sum of last 7 digits has to be a multiple of 7, not sure if I remember correctly but definitely very simple

neverrroot 4y ago

The good old FXP days…

ofalkaed 4y ago

This gives me some serious nostalgia for those simple and naive days. Around 95' is when I accomplished my one and only successful attempt at cracking. Some company had their software downloads in password protected StuffIt archives, anyone could download the software but you had to buy it to get the password so you could decompress the archive. I really wanted to use that software and I searched everywhere on the net and on BBSs for that program or the password with no luck, so I set out to crack the archive. I made two archives, one with password protection and one without and then opened them in ResEdit, turns out the only difference between them was that the protected file had a second resource other than the data, delete that extra resource and it became a normal unprotected StuffIt archive. I shared my findings to the community and within days it was all over the web and on every BBS, people where pretending they were the ones who made the hack, it was everywhere. Within weeks StufIt released a free update to fix this and I felt quite powerful at the effect I had caused. Years later I realized that my crack was banal and probably common knowledge to anyone but an ignorant teenager, most were just smart enough to not share it and ruin a good thing. So I inadvertently made the digital world a safer place. Edit: thinking on it more, I doubt I was even the first person to share this information, I was just the first person stupid enough to share it on an easy to find warez/cracking site that everyone had access too. I also seem to recall that Stuffit explicitly said that this password protection was not a safe or reliable way to protect your data, if you wanted that you had to upgrade to the paid version. I probably had no real effect on anything and the new password protection StuffIt rolled out was probably already in the works when I showed up.

phoenixreader 4y ago

It's interesting that Youtube is also recommending this to me today. I wonder what caused this coincidence. Anyone else seeing this on their Youtube feed?

Kwpolska 4y ago
I suppose YouTube saw the spike in the video's popularity, caused by this HN post, and started recommending it to people who might be interested in it.
- stiGGG 4y ago
  I had it in my feed and watched it some hours before this was posted here.
- aprilnya 4y ago
  Or the other way around — YouTube started recommending it more, so OP saw it and posted it on HN.

macjohnmcc 4y ago

I worked at Microsoft when Windows 95 was released and I'm certain that is the key we use to install it internally.

innocentoldguy 4y ago

111-1111111 is also a valid key for Windows 98 and the Office suite of that era.

AnnoyedComment 4y ago

[dead]

bobowzki 4y ago

Identity key...

rootsudo 4y ago

Reading all these comments about people mailing floppies and cd's, it's glad I was also part of that scene too - in trading fansubbed anime titles, and trading for more copies to complete strangers. Had a geocities page, and even did transcoding with tmpgenc - back when k-lite codec packs were popular, pre VLC days. Just can't believe with the right keywords, you can still see these old posts on the internet - 2002/2003 was truly different and I bet pre-2000 even wild.

MrYellowP 4y ago

You've posted this 12 hours ago, which was roughly when it showed up in my youtube feed. Did you post this, because it showed up in your youtube feed?

nezza-_- 4y ago
It seems like the YouTube algorithm started randomly recommending it to a lot of people (before it landed on HN)

meerita 4y ago

Ah, the gold old days of software-keys.txt lists with millions of keys of all version of DOS, Windows, OS/Warp, Autodesk, etc.

chungy 4y ago

OEM keys for Windows 95 followed a similar structure to the retail key, albeit with a lot more digits. OEM Windows 95 keys came in the form of XXXXX-OEM-00YYYYY-ZZZZZ. The XXXXX grouping represents when Microsoft issued the key by day-of-year and year, and the operating system would validate any number where the first three numbers range from 001 to 365 (or 366 for year 96), and the last two X digits were 95-99. The YYYYY group must be a multiple to 7, excluding the number 0. The ZZZZZ group is basically noise and anything is permissible in them. Now you can run a Windows 95 keygen in your head. You're welcome :) Actually I believe Windows 98, Me, and 2000 have a similar scheme but they obfuscate it with some algorithm to generate the 25-char alphanumeric style that Microsoft continues to use to this day. I've never dug into how it goes, but you can see the 95-style key on System Properties post-install.

bonney_io 4y ago
For no reason other than it seemed fun, I used this new knowledge to implement my own version of said key-gen, in my choice of dev environment: Swift and Xcode playgrounds. Fun little exercise. https://gist.github.com/Bonney/5cc85f41cdeb80146c7d5169ded8aecd https://gist.github.com/Bonney/5cc85f41cdeb80146c7d5169ded8a...
- chungy 4y ago
  Impressive, I see one definite problem and a potential one: * I had incorrectly stated the conditions of the Y grouping. The digits must sum up to a multiple of 7, rather than be a multiple of 7 by themselves. 0000007 and 0000016 are valid sequences, for instance, but 0000014 is not. * The Z grouping probably has to be [0-9]. At least I've never tested non-numeric characters whenever I've installed Windows 95 (I usually type out 00195-OEM-0000007-00000 when I install it).

fitjghfgddgf 4y ago

[flagged]

Villodre 4y ago

I found a Half-Life CD in the street, just laying there, when it was a new game and all the rage. I guess it slipped from somebody's jewel case or the like. By some miracle, it wasn't scratched enough to be unreadable, so I went and installed it but… no key. Out of frustration I started to just type silly sequences, until arriving at one that worked: 1234567890 until filling the textbox completely. Man, the sheer joy and happiness when the game installed and ran without issue. I had to tweak the settings a lot because I had a P75 with a 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card but nonetheless I enjoyed a lot of that game and I still have that disc. I hope the original owner was able to get hold of a copy and still use his original licence though.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

To reinstall Win95 in late 90´s was a chance. You had an hour or two then the worms ended it. Fun times. :)